Re: [DNG] AMD Ryzen? -> AMD bashing

[Simon Walter]

On 3/21/20 12:15 PM, terryc wrote:

On Wed, 18 Mar 2020 18:24:27 +0100
Antony Stone  wrote:


Hi.

Does anyone here have experience of running Devuan on AMD Ryzen CPUs?


Aps, a bit slow. We had a pair of these;

processor   : 3
vendor_id   : AuthenticAMD
cpu family  : 23
model   : 17
model name  : AMD Ryzen 3 2200G with Radeon Vega Graphics
stepping: 0
microcode   : 0x810100b
cpu MHz : 1600.000
cache size  : 512 KB


This is almost the slowest Ryzen you can buy, is it not?

...


2) it turned out to be very picky on the brand of Ramm chips or it
didn't like operating at less than the 2200G


Wow, so yeah, you do not know what you are doing.

...


As someone who had a stock of older Intel mobo/cpus that I ran
into the ground and considered 10 years as a good life,but knew that
some brands struggled to last five years, I decided to buy AMD to
ensure competition and I've been a bit shocked in the apparent failure
rate. 50% in FX series cpus, 100% in A4 cpus and 50% in the above Ryzen
motherboard. My tip is to make sure you have good warranty coverage
and retain all the bits until that period has passed. I've stuck to
buying Asus brand as te seem less contemptable towards linux.


...

CPUs do not usually fail unless you are overclocking them or it is a 
secondary failure caused by the motherboard or PSU. In the first case, 
you broke it yourself. In the second case, the CPU is not to blame either.


So it sounds like you are either spreading FUD, or are just really good 
at finding shady vendors that sell refurbished hardware as brand new.


I've used only AMD for my and my customers' servers and workstations for 
the last 15 years - more recently, laptops too. I have had one (1) 
motherboard (AsuS) problem. A capacitor blew and I was sent a 
replacement right away. All the Opteron, A4, A6, A8, A10, A12, Ryzen 
systems are still running. Lots have been upgraded with more RAM (It is 
an acronym for Random Access Memory. Spelling it "Ramm chips" just makes 
you look ignorant. There are multiple "chips" on one "stick". You could 
say RAM sticks if you wanna sound cool.) and with newer CPU and SSDs. I 
have not tried EPIC nor Threadripper.


I challenge your "apparent failure rate". All of your A4 CPUs failed. 
How many was that? One? Please be more specific on how they failed and 
what the reason they failed if you want to be taken seriously. What 
motherboard? You don't mention a motherboard, just a 2200G.


Simon
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Re: [DNG] AMD Ryzen?

[terryc]

On Wed, 18 Mar 2020 18:24:27 +0100
Antony Stone  wrote:

> Hi.
> 
> Does anyone here have experience of running Devuan on AMD Ryzen CPUs?

Aps, a bit slow. We had a pair of these;

processor   : 3
vendor_id   : AuthenticAMD
cpu family  : 23
model   : 17
model name  : AMD Ryzen 3 2200G with Radeon Vega Graphics
stepping: 0
microcode   : 0x810100b
cpu MHz : 1600.000
cache size  : 512 KB

There were two problems;

1) that mysterious bug that everyone was chasing and all sort of weird
solutions were suggested, and

2) it turned out to be very picky on the brand of Ramm chips or it
didn't like operating at less than the 2200G

I can not remember exactly what solution worked for me, but it was a
BIOS and possibly a configuration file change. I didn't even have to
download and/or compile any program. Until it was fixed, that problem
happened almost daily.

The Ramm chip problem(not as frequent) was solved by just buying a known
reliable sticks at the higher speed.
> 
> I'm just planning to get a new PC, and I've generally preferred AMD
> to Intel, so just wondering whether there's anything I need to look
> out for with pretty much the latest hardware.

As someone who had a stock of older Intel mobo/cpus that I ran
into the ground and considered 10 years as a good life,but knew that
some brands struggled to last five years, I decided to buy AMD to
ensure competition and I've been a bit shocked in the apparent failure
rate. 50% in FX series cpus, 100% in A4 cpus and 50% in the above Ryzen
motherboard. My tip is to make sure you have good warranty coverage
and retain all the bits until that period has passed. I've stuck to
buying Asus brand as te seem less contemptable towards linux.

Latest hardware; definitely not. I like to let other experience that
joy. VBG.

> > https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article=ryzen-3700x-3900x-
> linux=2 seems pretty off-putting, however it exclusively mentions
> "systemd services not starting", so I wonder how much this is
> systemd-based and how much it might be Linux drivers in general.

Dmesg does occasionally show spurious non-fatal messages, but the
"windows solution" of an occasional reboot fixes them. 

The systems both run Devuan-Ascii well.
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Re: [DNG] AMD Ryzen?

[viverna]

il devuanizzato Antony Stone  il 18-03-20 
18:24:27 ha scritto:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article=ryzen-3700x-3900x-linux=2
seems pretty off-putting, however it exclusively mentions "systemd
services not starting", so I wonder how much this is systemd-based and how
much it might be Linux drivers in general.
It is not a systemd problem, but AMD firmware problem. I think that AMD 
have corrected it last summer.

I have no more specific information.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/07/12/amd-motherboard-patch-ryzen-3000-customers-affected-by-destiny-2-and-linux-boot-problems/#6bed6dde16b8
https://betanews.com/2019/07/13/amd-ryzen-3000-linux-problems/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/how-a-months-old-amd-microcode-bug-destroyed-my-weekend/

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Re: [DNG] AMD Ryzen?

[Adam Borowski]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 02:02:08PM -0700, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 06:24:27PM +0100, Antony Stone wrote:
> > Does anyone here have experience of running Devuan on AMD Ryzen CPUs?

Similar results on 2990WX (a gen older).

With systemd, there's a hard power-off (with a nasty screech from the fan)
somewhere late during boot.  Not a squeal on serial, _usually_ physical
poweroff (G3 not G2) helps but after a case it didn't help I'm not digging
harder.

Without systemd, everything works perfectly, including any tests I could
think of.

> > I'm just planning to get a new PC, and I've generally preferred AMD to 
> > Intel,

High core-count AMDs _suck_.  They have so poor memory and
chiplet-to-chiplet bandwidth that in most loads I tried a much smaller Intel
beats them easily.

For example, a simple multithreaded task:
* 64 threads: 12000 seconds
* 16 threads (numactl -N 0): 9000 seconds
* a 6700K Skylake: 1200 seconds
* a 2*56-thread server, -N 0: somewhere near geometric average of the two
  above

(Disclaimer: I work at one of these companies, and that's not AMD.)

> > so just wondering whether there's anything I need to look out for with 
> > pretty 
> > much the latest hardware.
> 
> Yes:
> 
> 1. Upgrade your kernel to 4.10 or later. If you install the kernel
>from Beowulf-backports, that should be good enough. 

For me, even with 5.6-rc6 doesn't make the problem disappear.

Thus, it's possible there are _multiple_ bugs in systemd where it pokes into
places it shouldn't poke into.


Meow!
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Re: [DNG] AMD Ryzen?

[wirelessduck--- via Dng]

> b. See if your UEFI has a Power Supply Idle Control setting, and set
> it to typical if it does.

Some AMD motherboards either won’t have that (MSI) or need a bios update to get 
that setting.

I’ve got a threadripper 2950x running with Linux on the MSI MEG X399 CREATION. 
No options available for power supply idle, but it seems to work fine with the 
latest bios. I seem to recall that the Ryzen bug had been fixed by the time 
this threadripper chip was released though, so maybe it’s also fixed for the 
newer Ryzen chips too?
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Re: [DNG] AMD Ryzen?

[tempforever]

I recently upgraded to AMD Ryzen.  I'm running Devuan ascii.
With the 4.9.x kernel, I didn't have sensor readings (X570 chipset); I 
upgraded to 5.4 to get those.  Other than that, it seemed to run fine 
under 4.9.


I haven't yet experienced the "linux ryzen crash" -- no system freezes 
at all.  Of course, your "mileage may vary."


Until a few months ago, I had not used AMD since the 1990s.  I'm pleased 
that it is both stable and performing well.


Gregory Nowak wrote:

On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 06:24:27PM +0100, Antony Stone wrote:

Does anyone here have experience of running Devuan on AMD Ryzen CPUs?

I'm just planning to get a new PC, and I've generally preferred AMD to Intel,
so just wondering whether there's anything I need to look out for with pretty
much the latest hardware.


Yes:

1. Upgrade your kernel to 4.10 or later. If you install the kernel
from Beowulf-backports, that should be good enough.

2. There is the linux ryzen crash. Type that into your favorite
search engine, and you'll get a whole bunch of info on it. Here's a
good page from those results:



To work around this, you have a few options:

a. Use the zenstates.py script to disable c6 state.

b. See if your UEFI has a Power Supply Idle Control setting, and set
it to typical if it does.

c. After experimentation, I've found that setting the CPU governor to
"schedutil", and leaving c6 enabled works fine for me, and gives me
the best of all worlds; c6 enabled, and no crashes.

3. There was a problem with the VME implementation on ryzen, which has
since been fixed:



That's all I can think of for now. You might want to check the
wikipedia ryzen page in case I forgot something.

Greg




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Re: [DNG] AMD Ryzen?

[Antony Stone]

On Wednesday 18 March 2020 at 22:02:08, Gregory Nowak wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 06:24:27PM +0100, Antony Stone wrote:
> > Does anyone here have experience of running Devuan on AMD Ryzen CPUs?
> > 
> > I'm just planning to get a new PC, and I've generally preferred AMD to
> > Intel, so just wondering whether there's anything I need to look out for
> > with pretty much the latest hardware.
> 
> Yes:
> 
> 1. Upgrade your kernel to 4.10 or later. If you install the kernel
>from Beowulf-backports, that should be good enough.

That doesn't sound like a problem, since my main purpose here is to "get up to 
date" again with a current system, both hardware and software.  I leave it too 
long between upgrades :)

> 2. There is the linux ryzen crash. Type that into your favorite
>search engine, and you'll get a whole bunch of info on it. Here's a
>good page from those results:
> 
> 

Wow.  Lots of reading there (never mind finding other results too).  Thanks for 
that, and for the suggestions to deal with this:

> 3. There was a problem with the VME implementation on ryzen, which has
>since been fixed:
> 
> 
> 
> That's all I can think of for now. You might want to check the
> wikipedia ryzen page in case I forgot something.

Thanks for taking the time - gives me plenty to consider :)


Antony.

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Re: [DNG] AMD Ryzen?

[Gregory Nowak]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 06:24:27PM +0100, Antony Stone wrote:
> Does anyone here have experience of running Devuan on AMD Ryzen CPUs?
> 
> I'm just planning to get a new PC, and I've generally preferred AMD to Intel, 
> so just wondering whether there's anything I need to look out for with pretty 
> much the latest hardware.

Yes:

1. Upgrade your kernel to 4.10 or later. If you install the kernel
   from Beowulf-backports, that should be good enough. 

2. There is the linux ryzen crash. Type that into your favorite
   search engine, and you'll get a whole bunch of info on it. Here's a
   good page from those results:



To work around this, you have a few options:

a. Use the zenstates.py script to disable c6 state.

b. See if your UEFI has a Power Supply Idle Control setting, and set
it to typical if it does.

c. After experimentation, I've found that setting the CPU governor to
"schedutil", and leaving c6 enabled works fine for me, and gives me
the best of all worlds; c6 enabled, and no crashes.

3. There was a problem with the VME implementation on ryzen, which has
   since been fixed:



That's all I can think of for now. You might want to check the
wikipedia ryzen page in case I forgot something.

Greg


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[DNG] AMD Ryzen?

[Antony Stone]

Hi.

Does anyone here have experience of running Devuan on AMD Ryzen CPUs?

I'm just planning to get a new PC, and I've generally preferred AMD to Intel, 
so just wondering whether there's anything I need to look out for with pretty 
much the latest hardware.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article=ryzen-3700x-3900x-
linux=2 seems pretty off-putting, however it exclusively mentions "systemd 
services not starting", so I wonder how much this is systemd-based and how 
much it might be Linux drivers in general.


Thanks for any guidance.


Antony.

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This is Real Life.

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